Evaluating simplified air force models for cloth simulation

Any cloth simulation system needs the aerodynamics model to describe the dynamic behavior of the cloth interacting with the air. Different air force model has different simplification treatment with different approximation degree. In this paper, we present a quantitative evaluation method for simplified air force models, and experimentally investigate 5 different air force models which are all commonly used in cloth simulations. The results show that the lift component, which was usually neglected in air force models, actually plays an important role in the simulation. Moreover, when the air field is simplified as the linear global wind field, the air force model containing the linear drag component and simple upward lift component matches the real cloth motion better than the complicated nonlinear ones.